Igor Engraver

NoteHeads Music Experts Systems AB, Sweden

holistic designs, Sweden

NoteHeads is a company dedicated to bringing musicians and
publishers together through the medium of highly sophisticated
Internet-oriented music publishing software. Igor Engraver is the main
product of NoteHeads.

holistic designs is a small consulting company specialised in
technical software, such as image processing for medical applications,
speech synthesis and, more specifically, Igor Engraver.

Igor Engraver is a music notation program, used for composing and
arranging music. It can be likened to a typesetting program that works
on music and music notation rather than words. As such, the problem of
typesetting music is more complicated than typesetting text (which in
itself is complicated). There are more issues to handle when notating
music, as music has more dimensions than text.

Igor Engraver provides an intuitive user interface for inputting
music in different modes, a notation engine that takes care of
notation and a playback engine that can play the written music using
MIDI equipment. Playback is also an interesting problem in itself as a
mechanical playback (exactly as the music is written) will sound
rather dull and devoid of life. Igor Engraver has knowledge of the
specific workings of different instruments so, for example, a glissando is played differently on a piano and a
trombone.

Igor Engraver also solves a common problem in music notation by
allowing the composer to work either directly in a score or a part - a
change in one is reflected in the other, even if one is a
transposition of the other. Also, there are no restrictions on the
order in which music is to be entered - the composer can work in the
manner that suits him or her, that is, not adapting to a software
imposed work flow.

Professional results: Igor Engraver lets you produce professional looking music with the greatest ease, as you can see from this example (by Reger).

Igor Engraver is written almost entirely in Lisp, meaning less than
1% is non-Lisp.

Igor Engraver was first available on Mac OS (before LispWorks for
Macintosh was available). When considering a Windows version, LispWorks for Windows was found to be
the most cost effective alternative. Development of LispWorks has
since been ongoing and a Mac OS version has been released. There are
now plans to go full circle and release a version of Igor Engraver
using LispWorks for Macintosh.

The Lisp savvy will probably wonder about my name. FAQ:
1. Is your name really Cons?
A: Yes.
2. Were your parents Lisp hackers?
A: No.
3. Is it just a coincidence, Cons being a short form of, say, Constantin?
A: No, my name really is Cons and Lisp is the origin. Lisp was the
third language to cross my way (in days long yonder, before my
undergraduate studies) and it was a pleasant experience from the
start. When engaging in role playing (as an alternative to
studying), one character was named after some rather common Lisp
primitives (Cons among them). Shortly thereafter, I was given an
account on a computer belonging to the computer science department
(I was doing physics), not knowing at that time what they were into
(AI, Lisp and Prolog as it turned out), so I used the RPG
character's name for the account. As is quite common, the user
name stuck, became a nickname, was shortened to just Cons. Before
getting married, I registered it as my offical name.
4. ..and the T?
A: Initial for the name that only my parents insist on using.
5. Which is?
A: You're not one of my parents, I think.